Celebrating the female gaze

Feminist forays

The HKILF has a raft of talks and readings that make space for women's perspectives, the sessions titled "Imprint 22: Women's Voices", hosted by the Women in Publishing Society (March 7), and "The Stories Women Journalists Tell" with Zela Chin, Jervina Lao and Caitlin Liu (March 10), for example. Diana Reid, who won the prestigious MUD Literary Prize, awarded annually at the Adelaide Writers' Week, appears on March 6 and 7 to talk about her novels Love and Virtue and Seeing Other People. Reid's novels are incredibly vivid, current, feminist explorations of sex, power, love, class, and relationships. Seeing Other People deconstructs sisters Charlie and Eleanor's sometimes caustic, sometimes envious, always-complex relationship over a summer that pushes it to its limits.

Mirinae Lee and Nguyên will reach back to explore the complicated legacies of war and colonialism in their books 8 Lives of a Century-old Trickster (March 9) and Dust Child (March 8). Mirinae Lee's genre-defying debut follows the lifelong struggle of a woman from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to survive abuse by manipulating her identity at the risk of losing it altogether. Nguyên similarly tackles identity from the perspective of ordinary people trying to get out from under the impact of generational trauma. Both reflect on defining moments in history that, until recently, have been interpreted by men.

For Mirinae Lee, the female struggle interrogated in 8 Lives is more universal than conventional wisdom holds. The book follows a pattern of sex slavery from World War II, to Korea, to Vietnam, showing that Japanese, Korean and American soldiers were equally culpable. "This kind of tragic history of women in wartime tends to repeat itself whether it's in the West or the East," she says.

Nguyên for her part looks beyond her wartime setting to celebrate Vietnam's 4,000-year-old cultural history. "So many books have been written from the viewpoints of men about this time," says the writer, who "wanted to insert voices from Vietnamese women" into the narrative for a change. She has based her protagonists, the sisters Trang and Quýnh, "on those who can contradict the white male's gaze on Vietnamese women and show that we are not pitiful, naive or opportunistic as depicted in many Hollywood movies about Vietnam; rather, we are often the pillars of our families and the Vietnamese society". On top of that, Nguyên shines a light in her novel on the nearly 100,000 mixed-race children born during the American war in Vietnam, many of them still seeking an identity.